Falling into Place Read online

  So there were no more hugs in the Emerson household.

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  CHAPTER NINE

  Voicemail

  Monica doesn’t go back to the waiting room. She finds a chair and drags it to the hallway outside the ICU, and her arms are shaking so badly that she drops it twice. She positions it beside the doors, reaches into her purse, and pulls out her phone.

  She makes three calls. The first, to her boss, to let him know that her daughter is in the hospital and she will not be going to work, or to Bangkok that weekend. The second, to the airline, to cancel her reservation.

  And the third, to her daughter, so she can hear her voice on the recorded message.

  “Hey. It’s Liz. I obviously can’t answer at the moment, so leave a message.”

  Monica calls again and again, and she doesn’t know why, but each time she expects a different ending.

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  CHAPTER TEN

  Popularity: An Analysis

  Kennie half trips off the bus, stretching her sleeping leg as she wobbles across the parking lot. Out of habit, Kennie looks around for Liz’s Mercedes, or Julia’s Ford Falcon (which, despite Liz’s endless teasing and the fact that Julia has access to both of her father’s Porsches, she refuses to get rid of). They always went to each other’s meets games and competitions—she had even sat through their soccer tournaments, every single one, though she never knew when to cheer. But then she remembers that Julia is buried alive in homework and Liz apparently had something else to do today, so no one is here to watch her dance.

  That’s the thing about Kennie—she has always liked being watched. Whereas Julia dislikes attention and Liz hardly seems to notice it, Kennie needs it like certain other people need cocaine. She’s the kind of person who says things that make jaws drop. She likes it when people stare and talk and judge, because it means that someone is always thinking about her. It’s what popularity means to her, and Kennie, frankly, has always been popular.

  Meridian is a Small Town, the kind that’s as faithful to football as religion, the kind with a number of strange habits that define us and them, the kind with an unspoken and unyielding caste system. Popularity in Meridian extends beyond high school—it encompasses the entire community, the churches and stores and workplaces. There’s a clique of ten or so families that has been around for as long as Meridian, and they have spawned nearly all of the jocks, preps, and prom court members. A much greater percentage of the town falls into the social middle: those who live in the small gated community by the country club (because the elite does not, in fact, represent the economic pinnacle of Meridian, and is just the slightest bit resentful of those who do), and almost everyone else. And then there are the shamefully poor, the newcomers, the other anomalies; it is generally agreed that this group is not to be associated with.

  Liz knew which group she would be in when she moved to Meridian. I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but she was—she was certain that she knew how to be happy.

  The dance team takes their places on stage, and Kennie looks around the crowd again for Liz’s face, or Julia’s, and she gives a small huff when she doesn’t see either. I’m more important than homework.

  She doesn’t think about why she expects them, because her family belongs to the first group. Kennie is always surrounded by friends—her mother is a teacher at the elementary school and the high school track coach, her father is a church deacon and works at the bank and sits on the school board, and her great-great-great-great-grandfather’s face is framed in the municipal building alongside the other nine original residents of Meridian.

  Liz, a relative newcomer, should have fallen into the last group. For that matter, Julia should have too—and she had, until Liz pulled her out. Kennie doesn’t pay attention to popularity much, because she’s always had it, but she’s suddenly very glad that Liz and Julia fell into the right group, hers, even if she doesn’t quite know why.

  She can’t afford to think about it too hard, because the position she holds is an extraordinarily uncomfortable one and the music is about to start, but thinking doesn’t take too much effort. Liz is Liz. Popularity, Kennie decides, has a lot to do with confidence. And to Kennie, Liz has more confidence than the rest of Meridian put together.

  Despite the fact that Kennie is one of the few people in the world who has seen Liz cry and lash out in frustration, who has seen the part of Liz Emerson that the rest of her tries so hard to hide, Liz is still invincible to her. Whatever Kennie’s life looks like from the outside, there is little stability where she stands. Liz is her constant. Liz keeps her steady when her parents fight and her grades dip and her world wobbles.

  Kennie counts down the last beats, and bursts into the rehearsed spins and leaps and toe touches, and she doesn’t think anymore.

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  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Junior Class

  “And where did you say you were headed, son?”

  “Costco,” says Liam. He faces the cop but watches the door out of the corner of his eye. It opens again, and this time the night carries in Lily Maxime and Andrea Carsten, who are undoubtedly here to confirm the rumors. They hate Liz Emerson because she ignored them. Their eyes are red, and they start sobbing when they reach the group of Meridian students huddled around a low table.

  There are a hundred and forty-three students in Liam’s graduating class, and a good third of them are here tonight. He can’t figure out why. Liz Emerson slipped on the goddamn road—clearly tonight is not a night to be driving around in the dark.

  “I was running errands for my mom,” he adds.

  “And you saw Elizabeth’s car as you drove past?”

  Liz Emerson, he corrects automatically in his head. She is always Liz Emerson to him. He doesn’t think he knows her well enough to call her exclusively by her first name. But then again, he doesn’t know her well enough to think of her as often as he does, either.

  “Yeah.”

  “How did you know it was her car?”

  “I’d know her car anywhere.”

  This he says without thinking, and regrets it when the police officer asks, “Were you good friends?”

  “No,” says Liam. “Not really.”

  Not at all.

  The police officer gives him a strange look. Liam doesn’t care. He is watching his classmates again, huddled around each other and whispering, crying into each other’s shoulders. Not just crying—sobbing these awful sobs that made everything shake, and Liam wants to scream that she isn’t dead. She is alive right now, down the hall somewhere—not whole, but alive, and everyone is sobbing like she’s already gone.

  Half of these people have no reason to be here. Most of these people, really. Liam wonders what Liz Emerson would do if she knew that Jessie Klayn, who flips her off once a day when her back is turned, had already gone through an entire box of tissues. And Lena Farr too—Lena Farr, who had spent all of lunch today ranting about what a selfish bitch Liz Emerson is. Liam had heard it all from the next table over.

  Laugh, probably. Liz Emerson would laugh, and he is glad she wasn’t here to see it, because Liz Emerson did not have a nice laugh anymore. She had a laugh like a knife on skin.

  “All right,” says the police officer. “Well, that’s it for now. We might track you down later, though, kid.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  He doesn’t know he means it until he says it aloud.

  Liz is not a selfish bitch.

  If she were, she wouldn’t have planned anything, everything.

  But she did.


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  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Three Weeks Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car

  It was January 1, and Liz had just come home to an empty house after a New Year’s Eve party.

  She was drunker than she had ever been in her life, and it was not a particularly enjoyable experience. She stumbled into the foyer and leaned against the door to keep herself upright, and swallowed a few times to delay the puke. When she closed her eyes, she could still see the pulsing lights impressed upon her personal darkness, and it made her dizzy. She gave up, and slid to the floor, her head pounding, everything spinning. She needed someone, anyone, to touch her and remind her that she wasn’t the last person in the world.

  She opened her eyes and found the chandelier instead. The light was blinding, like angels, like angels falling and flying and coming for her, and she tried to think of a reason to go on.

  She couldn’t.

  But she could think of a thousand reasons to give up. She thought of her father dying. She thought of how her mother wouldn’t be home for another week. She thought of Kyle Jordan’s lips on hers and his hands on her body, just an hour ago. And she closed her eyes, and thought about how he was Kennie’s boyfriend, but she had kissed him back anyway, because she had never felt so alone as she had then, drunk and stupid and trying not to cry at a stranger’s party.

  But, god, how could she explain that to Kennie?

  She couldn’t, ever. She opened her eyes again. The light still stabbed and the angels still fell, and she began to plan her suicide.

  She thought of stuffing herself with pills. She thought of filling her bathtub with water and making those long cuts across her arms. She thought of scarves and pantyhose, and hanging from the loft like an ornament. She thought of a quick shot, a bright explosion. But did they didn’t have a gun. Did they?

  Liz couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember anything.

  She was curled in a ball in the middle of the foyer when the numbness faded and the tears came, and she sobbed with her face pressed against the hardwood. She washed the floor with her tears and polished it with her snot, and finally she had three rules.

  First, it would be an accident. Or it would look like one. It would look like anything but suicide, and no one would ever wonder what they did wrong, what made her give up. She would die, and maybe everyone would forget that she had ever lived.

  Second, she would do it in a month. Well, three weeks. She would do it on the tenth anniversary of the day her dad fell off the roof and broke his neck. She would give her mother just this one day of sadness every year, instead of two.

  And three, she would do it somewhere far away. She wanted a stranger to find her body, so no one she loved would see her broken.

  They didn’t work, her rules.

  Liam found her. Liam, who had loved her since the first day of fifth grade, was driving down the interstate when he turned and saw her, the bright green of her sweater visible through what remained of the window.

  Her mother is crying silent tears in the hallway outside the ICU, whispering her daughter’s name and her husband’s name, over and over again like a prayer, the tears pooling on the backs of her shaking hands and falling, falling, falling.

  And I won’t forget. I promise her what no one else can. I promise her, always.

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  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Midnight

  It’s very quiet. Distant buzzing, background beeping. The waiting room is mostly empty. Liam has fallen asleep. The zipper of his hoodie is caught between his face and the window, imprinting the pattern of teeth across his cheek and lips. In his pocket, his dying phone vibrates with yet another call from his frantic mother, but it isn’t enough to wake him up.

  Down the hall, Monica Emerson is asleep too, her head against the wall. The nurse with the pink dinosaurs on her scrubs walks by and sees her, and goes for a blanket. As she tucks it around Monica’s shoulders, Monica stirs and whispers her daughter’s name.

  Upstairs, Julia sits in the cafeteria with her fingers wrapped around her third Red Bull. Tonight is the first time she’s ever tried one. She doesn’t like the taste, not at all, and she hates the tremors, but at least she’s awake. She must stay awake, and she repeats it to herself as though it’ll keep her eyelids from fluttering shut. She can’t sleep tonight. She won’t. She must be awake when—if, if—bad news comes, because she cannot bear the idea of waking to it.

  Kennie is just getting home. The competition results got delayed due to some scoring mix-up, and they were there for hours longer than they should have been. It doesn’t matter. They won.

  Cheeks sore, stomach cramped.

  She slips through the garage door into a dark house. Her parents are both awake in their separate bedrooms, her father working and her mother reading, but she doesn’t want to see either of them. She needs to charge her phone—it is dead in her pocket, and their coach has a strict “no phones at competitions” rule, anyway. They’re supposed to focus or bond or some other crap, though no one would have agreed to it had there been any service at all. She plugs it in and goes to the bathroom.

  Shower. Sparkles and spandex for a worn pair of pajamas.

  She comes back and checks her phone in the dark—her mother has just yelled for her to go to bed, she has school tomorrow—and opens her Facebook app.

  Wet hair atop her head, a story through statuses.

  Oh my god I can’t believe it Liz Emerson crashed her car she’s in the hospital she doesn’t look good she’s dying she’s dead she’s not she is be safe Liz we’re praying for you we’re praying praying praying.

  She screams for her parents and runs into the hallway with the screen of her phone glaring. They refuse to let her drive to the hospital.

  She goes back to her room with sobs tearing her apart. She lies in the darkness, surrounded by pillows and an impossible amount of fear.

  SNAPSHOT: TWO

  We’re on the roof. It’s flat, a balcony that they never added a railing to. A few feet away, Liz’s father is fixing a leak.

  She is pulling the chalk across the freezing surface and singing. Her breath hangs in the air. She draws two little girls, as always. The first looks like her—a bundle girl today, boots and hat and puffy cloud coat. The second is never the same.

  Today, I wear a pink sequined dress. I have the hair of her favorite doll and a pair of shoes she’s designing herself.

  The wind invites the powder snow to dance, and the sun is everywhere. Soon, we will get bored and put the chalk away, but right now, we are happy. We draw. We sing.

  She finishes the heel of my shoe. Her fingers are chapped.

  It is the last picture I will ever be in.

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  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Fifty-Eight Minutes Before Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car

  She was still in Meridian then, just turning onto the interstate. Her backpack was beside her in the passenger seat—exams started next Monday, so it held every single one of her textbooks. She had filled it out of habit, and now she wished she hadn’t. Textbooks were expensive.

  Her grades were still mostly decent, if only because someone was sure to notice if they had nose-dived. She was glad her GPA was still intact. At least something was.

  But, she supposed, none of that mattered anymore. She hadn’t finished the last physics project; her grade, which had been hovering precariously at a C minus, had surely dipped with that zero. She’d managed to keep an A until they started talking about Newton—whom Mr. Eliezer had introduced as a lifelong virgin, like, Let’
s study this dude who was so obsessed with physics that he didn’t even want to have sex, isn’t he incredible?—and somewhere in the sudden flood of velocity and inertia and force, Liz had started falling behind.

  She just didn’t get physics. So there were all these theories and laws, and they’d spend weeks picking them apart, and in the end, Mr. Eliezer would tell them that they had to factor in air resistance and friction and all this other crap, so most of them couldn’t even be applied. It seemed sketchy to her, a science dependent upon the uncertainties of life.

  Still. It was nice, the idea that she would never have to stress about homework or grades or Newton the goddamn virgin ever again.

  But she turned onto the on ramp too sharply, and her backpack kept moving in one direction while the car turned in another. It thudded to the floor of the car, and Liz starting thinking about moving objects and Newton’s First Law.

  Objects at rest stay at rest, objects in motion stay in motion.

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  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  One Day After Liz Emerson Crashed Her Car

  Liz has always hated missing school. She hates making up work and wondering what happened without her. Did people talk about her? Did they call her slut and skank and worse things while she was gone? She always talks about people behind their backs, so she assumes that everyone else does too. Liz has gone to school with hangovers and migraines, bruises and sprains, colds and stomach flus, and once with a sore throat that started an epidemic of strep throughout the entire district.